Josh Steiner wrote:
Urs Liska wrote:
Well, after Frank's comment I searched the archive and found this article: http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html which convinces me that the lack of the reply-to header is rather a feature than a shortcoming.
I read that article and found only one of the arguments I could partially agree with: Principle of least damage.
As I subscribe to several lists, and they all use a reply-to, I can say from time to time private messages do come through, but its very little and really never had been close to be harmful. The reason for this is probably unproper use of filters in the e-mail program. If I collect my list mails into a seperate folder (I am using Thunderbird) this could not really happen ever. Its your own responsibility.
I want to reply always only to the list, really always!!!
For this mail I hit reply to all and it would send it to four adresses (I have to delete the first 'to' and two 'cc's' and change one 'cc' to 'to', or hit reply and change the adress to the list adress, what a mess!!!)
thats just one guys take on it, there is also :
"Reply-To Munging Considered Useful"
When reading this article I would agree to most of the arguments, but my expierience with other list show that in the article which claims munging as harmful its actually missing another argument against munging, I could agree to: the danger of creating loops. But those could be dealt with on a technological basis. (On the Max-list we had somebody going to vacation and setting up an automatic reply like "sorry I am on vacation, I'll come back to you as soon I'm home again", which really created a lot of useless traffic, it replied to all the messages of the list including itself...)
But it really isn't intuitive at all that I have to 'reply to all' if I want to respond to the list because 'the list' is one single mailing address to me (pd-list@iem.at).
However, now that I know how to deal with it, I'm OK with how it is. Urs
I still do not agree, but probably have to live with it which is sort of ok (I think its a bad compromise). If it happens you get a reply to a list topic from me, better forward it to the list, I probably hit the wrong key and its ment to be sent to the list.
Stefan